Category Archives: Dear diary

since i do my grocery shopping on a bike and live in a fourth-floor walk-up, i have to think about the weight of things. water weighs the most, and so bottles of liquid (milk, juice, wine, beer, mineral water) are the heaviest things, followed by produce that contains a lot of water (melons, oranges, onions, cauliflower, […]

I had this plan that I was going to watch all three Transformers movies this week and write something hilarious about how Michael Bay is a bleeding propagandist who markets a particular vision of unbridled and global American military power to children on behalf of his clients in the Pentagon. It was going to go […]

Open a bottle of wine and pour it, set up a WordPress installation on its own virtual server, group six rounds fired from a .38 Special revolver at 20 yards on a chest-sized target, graph data in Excel, flip an egg without a spatula, raise and train a puppy, dice a carrot, change the oil […]

Expatriates bitch. It’s like, you know how other adults go to parties and play charades or watch videos of huge men in tight pants and helmets rhythmically running into each other head first? Well, we expatriates bitch. We drink and bitch. We bitch about the local food, about the local women/men, about the local bureaucracy, […]

There’s this idea called quantum suicide. Let’s say you’re alone in a room, on a Wednesday, and you have a gun pointed at your head, and you pull the trigger. You will either hear a click, or you will hear nothing and just die. But imagine a universe of multiple worlds, a multiverse that branches […]

Investigative journalism has never been a money-maker for newspapers. It’s good for democracy, it makes newspapers into power brokers, and it occasionally sets the national conversation, but let’s be honest, front-page stories about Tiger Woods’ hook-ups sell way more papers than 6,000-word droners about health-care lobbyists. Newspapers were able to produce expensive, time-consuming investigative journalism […]

It’s not like I needed anything else to further dash my hopes about the future, but this Atlantic article added some pretty significant fuel to the house fire. Basically, we’re screwed for a generation, although I’m lucky enough to be less screwed than recent graduates, Rust Belt families, and minorities. Still, I get the additional […]

With now only 59 votes in the Senate, Democrats may not be able to pass health care reform. Tonight’s Senate vote in Massachusetts is a ridiculous coda to an absurdly difficult battle, and frankly, I don’t think we learned anything. Americans still haven’t fully grasped the fact that their health care system is an international […]

Dear Anyone Who Wants to Write or Speak in English: “Beg the question” does not – not – mean “raise the question.” It does not mean that. I’m not going to tell you want it means. If you want to know what it means, google it. Until you know what it means, don’t use it. […]